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"Tony, after everything you've seen, is anything really impossible?" Steve asks and Tony just has to talk over him, so he can hear himself think something other than 'What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuuuuccccckkkkkk?'
"Quantum fluctuation messes with the Planck scale, which then triggers the Deutsch proposition. Can we agree on that?" 'Time travel? Really? Time travel?' He thinks as he finishes pouring Steve's coffee.
"In layman's terms, it means you're not coming home."
"I did." the guy that supposedly had been trapped in the quantum realm answered. 'Who the fuck was this guy again?'
"No. You accidentally survived. It's a billion to one cosmic fluke." He sighs as he puts the carafe down. "And now you wanna pull a..." He hands the Antman (?) his coffee. "What do you call it?"
"A time heist?" The other man answers insecurely.
"Yeah, a time heist. Why didn't we think of this before?" Tony huffs. "Oh, because it's laughable. Because it's a pipe dream."
"The stones are in the past." Steve contributes his two pounds. "We could go back, we could get them."
"We could snap our own fingers. We can bring everybody back." Natasha continues and Tony huffed. 'This is ridiculous, they still don't see the big picture. Even after everything that happened.'
"Or screw it up worse than he already has, right?"
"I don't believe we would." Steve said, self righteous as always.
Direct dialogue from Avengers: Endgame
"But I do." Tony said, effectively shutting everyone up.
"Look, even if I could devise a way to do it, I wouldn't go back in time to five years ago to reverse the snap. I've got a daughter. I can't roll the dice on her."
"So we reverse the snap now, at this point in time." Antman said. Tony really needed to figure out his name.
Tony was lost for words so Natashalie jumped in. "We have to take a stand."
"We did stand. And yet here we are." Tony answered her and before anyone else could answer that tangent, that he wasn't going on, he figured he'd just tell them how ridiculous they were being.
'Reversing the snap now, as in right now? Do they seriously not see the consequences of that? But then again, this was Mr. The-safest-hands-are-our-own.'
He held up his hand to stop whatever Scott (right, Scott something or other, that was his name!) was going to say and spoke up.
"Even if..." He sighed. "Even if we ignore whatever the psychological consequences would be, for reversing the snap at this point in time, and even if we ignore that not everyone died in the snap directly, we just don't have the resources for reversing the snap."
"Resources?" Steve asked, like the man-without-a-plan that he actually was, and Tony resented him a little for being this ignorant.
"Resources." He just confirmed. "We just don't have the food to feed all the people that would come back." They all looked at him with this stumped look on their faces, as if they didn't get what he was talking about.
"Look Scott, I understand why you wouldn't think about this, you just came back from a five-year absence. But Natasha, Steve, you were there." He turned to them and even if Steve still wasn't getting it, Tony could see Natasha thinking. "You were there when the food rotted on the shelves in the supermarkets. You were there when there was an overabundance in produce in the fields and no manpower to actually farm it. You were there when the government made the though call to lower production, to lower the food supply, because the snapped weren't coming back."
He looked at both of them, as they couldn't look him in the eye, but he couldn't stop now, knowing that he had to drill this into their skulls before they did something stupid, like go to Bruce with this.
"You were there as people protested against their governments for this decision, you were there for the overwhelming despair that followed as everyone slowly started to realize that no, they weren't coming back."
Tony had to swallow back the lump in his throat as he thought back to that time.
"You were there as the government started actually tearing down condemned buildings, now that they weren't needed to house people anymore. You were there as the people who were living in those buildings were forcibly moved into better buildings, but having to leave behind their houses, their homes, where they used to live with the snapped."
Scott, Tony realized, was crying. Neither Steve or Natasha were, but Natasha was staring out into the woods with an anguished expression on her face and Steve was looking down at the floor as he was wringing his hands.
'Good, they're starting to get it. Now to drive the point home.'
"So if we bring everyone back, at this point in time, we just don't have the resources. We don't have the food to feed them. And we don't have the houses to shelter them."
Scott was full on sobbing at this point.
"They would starve in the streets."
An hour later, after a very subdued lunch, Steve turned to Tony.
"So what can we do?"
Tony looked at him, bewildered. 'Was he still not getting it?'
"I mean, can we get enough food again, and can we build enough shelter so that we can do this?"
"I suppose, theoretically, we could." Tony's mind started racing, fabricating ideas for new intelli-crops, for mass-producing prefab houses. But then his mind screeched to a halt once more as he remembered his daughter. His adopted daughter. He had adopted her after he had saved her, when he had helped with the volunteers who went from door to door to check for surviving children who had lost their parents because of the snap. She hadn't had any family left after the snap. If they undid the snap however...
"And practically?"
"Practically, that wouldn't be up to me."
"Why not?"
"Why not? Did you seriously just ask me, why it wouldn't be up to me to make sure our food scale was up to the task, that people would have enough houses for shelter?" Tony huffed in exasperation. "Contrarily to what you believe, Captain, I do not have a magic wand that can make all your problems go away."
"Yes, I know th..."
"I'm just one person, Captain." Tony spoke over Steve's protests as he got up to pace. "Yes, I can help, yes I can develop intelli-crops that can give our food supply a boost, yes I can start assembly lines for mass-producing prefab houses. But, Captain, I cannot just go around willy-nilly doing whatever I want. I'd need license's and FDA approval and building permits and workers, and the whole world would have to work with us, not just the United States, but the whole world." Tony stopped pacing, turning away from them as he leaned over the porch railing, knowing that what he was going to say next, would unleash an argument of epic proportion.
"And even if we could get all of that done, even if every single thing worked out like we planned it would, I'm not sure if we should actually do it."
"What? Why the hell not?" Steve almost yelled.
"Language, Captain." Tony couldn't help but say. "Because this whole line of reasoning, ignores the psychological effects of undoing the snap." He turned back around to face Steve and the others.
"Because people moved on, Steve, and we'd be overturning their lives again."
Steve huffed. "It's clear you didn't loose anyone."
"What." Tony said, and he noticed that Natasha put a hand on Steve's arm, as if to comfort him.
"Well yeah. I mean, you came back from space, a little banged up, I'll grant you that, but you got Pepper back, and Rhodey and even your bodyguard Happy. And now you have your daughter. I mean, clearly you didn't loose anyone."
Tony's mouth fell open, it was clear that both Steve and Natasha believed what he was saying and Tony didn't even bother to look at the other man as he stormed inside, slamming the door open. He was glad that Morgan was playing in her room with Pepper, who had come over to go over some thing for SI, and who had offered to keep Morgan busy and away from the others while they talked.
He grabbed two picture frames from the mantle and stormed outside again, not quite slamming them down on the table before Steve. No matter what, he would never damage those pictures.
"I didn't loose anyone?" Tony hissed at him. "I didn't loose anyone?" Tony laughed without any humor in his laugh.
"See those pictures? I lost them. I lost two boys I considered my sons." Tony's voice broke. "I didn't loose anyone, you say? I held my son in my arms as he begged for his life. I didn't loose ANYONE?" He yelled at Steve as the tears rolled down his face. "I lost EVERYTHING! Don't you dare tell me I didn't loose anyone."
Tony took a deep shaky breath, as he turned away from them again, leaning on his porch railing again. "I was with Rhodey as we heard that his mother, the woman that treated me as her son from the day Rhodey brought me home, was snapped. I was with Pepper when she couldn't reach her brother or his wife, eventually finding out that they were both snapped, leaving their five-year old son behind. I was with Happy when we went to tell May, Peter's aunt, that Peter had snapped, only to find out that she had been too. Sparing me off telling her the bad news, but Happy lost his girlfriend. So yeah, I had Pepper and Rhodey and Happy, but don't you dare tell me I didn't loose anyone."
"Tony. I'm sorry." Steve earnestly said.
Tony scoffed. "Save it, I don't need your platitudes."
He turned around as he wiped the tears from his face. "Now, what you do now, because I know you won't even consider doing nothing, is you go to the government. And you tell them what I told you. That there's a possibility that we could pull this time heist off. But that we need to up our food supply and that we need housing, before we even consider doing this. And then it can go two ways. One, I get the message of the government to start working on developing time travel and we do this. Or two, they say no."
Tony turned around considering them.
"Now, I know you, and know this, if the government says no, there's nothing here on earth that can move me to develop time travel. No matter what you do, no matter how much you beg or threaten or I don't know what the hell else you will come up with to convince me to do it, I won't. This time Steve Rogers, you're going to listen to the government. I know that Barnes is your ride or die, your BFF, your brother from another mother, or whatever the hell you want to call it, but clearly you're not the only one who lost someone. And don't even bother going to Bruce then, because I will have a talk with him about this, and I know that he'll side with me. Any questions?"
All three of them shook their heads.
"Good. Go away." Tony said as he walked back into the house, intent on hugging his daughter.